I snuck down there evenings he worked at the sawmill, to the lath and concrete room where he gutted perch, tossing tails to the cat. A galaxy of scales glistened on the tabletop, and specks of blood. But the floor was smooth, well-suited for skating to Journey’s “Don’t Stop Believin’.”

I was the girl in the song, and the room—its rows of rods and reels, waders, nets and oars—transformed as I dreamt of getting out, no longer destined to pass every weekend on some Idaho lake, dropping fish into a bucket for my father to clean. Going nowhere.

Jennifer Anderson is an English instructor at Lewis-Clark State College. Her essays have been published in The Missouri Review, the Colorado Review, Hayden’s Ferry Review, and The Cimarron Review, among other places.